Soulcatcher
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Rare discusses new challenges of Kinect development
Twenty-five years ago, Rare founders Chris and Tim Stamper had to reverse engineer a Japanese Famicom development kit in order to make the early NES game Slalom. Today, at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Rare Talent Director Nick Burton outlined some of the very different challenges the company has run into in the developing of Kinect Sports for Microsoft. "Kinect was a no-brainer as far as we were concerned," Burton said. "Just the opportunities it brought ... because it removes one layer between you and the computer." Burton said that Rare has always been interested in technology and game design that "is trying to remove that barrier to entry, trying to get that fun experience the entire family could have, but also getting the fidelity gamers could love." The problem with older motion control solutions Rare has worked with -- like accelerometers and even the Power Glove -- was that the fidelity wasn't there, Burton said. Rare tried to fix this for years by augmenting the original Xbox Live Vision Camera with a PlayStation-Move-style light-up handheld wand made out of a supermarket vitamin tin (pictured above). The first-person spell-casting game they made for the wand, Soulcatcher, never got out of the prototype stage, but it did go a long way to "prove you could have that kind of hardcore depth of experience with this kind of control scheme," Burton said. %Gallery-97510%
